This Background is intended to provide the basic context of this patent application and it is not intended to describe a specific problem to be solved.
As is well known, there are a limited number of dedicated IP addresses. As a result virtual IP addresses have been created to allow network users to access a network such as the Internet. However, the use of virtual IP addresses creates additional steps to decode the source and destination of packets. In addition, replying to packets from a virtual IP address is complicated and inefficient as the virtual IP address has to be converted to a private IP address and response to the virtual IP address do not offer guidance as to the private IP address that was the original sender.